Merit building has nice lights inside.

Cute Coffee

I was going to leave, but as i was heading out, the cute girl in the coffee shop gave me a free cup of coffee, so i took it as a sign from god that i was supposed to stay and work longer.

There are (at least) two points wrong with that statement.

Teething

My wisdom teeth have started to grow again, and with this comes the pain of breaking skin, twisting teeth, and intense pressure on my jaw and neck. I've been considering getting them removed, but that would require going to the dentist, and - more importantly - since my niece is teething right now, i figure i'm really relating to her by feeling the pain.

Empty bar.

Saw episode III tonight; glad that's over.

Decided to come into work afterwards - here's me in the server room at 4am.

Boots

Posting From Scripts

I recently got a new phone - one that takes video and photos and can e-mail these out. My goal was to post photos from my phone.

Short Version:

Initially, i wanted to write a script to do this, but couldn't get the interface to blogger working, so instead tried blogger's "go@blogger.com" solution. That didn't work either, i went back to working on a script, and finally got the script bit figured out. The two previous posts were done from my phone.

Longer Version:

I was hoping to be able to simply submit a post via e-mail. I have a wrapper script for an e-mail address on my server that parses messages from my phone, retrieves the photo and text, scales down the photo, and then e-mails blogger with an html img tag and the text. Blogger translated the tags into html entities, so i e-mailed them with a html encoding, and this mail was rejected.

Next i tried go@blogger.com, which is supposed to take picture mail from various providers, including mine, but kept getting Mail Delivery errors:
Command died with status 1: " /home/bloggermail/mail_2_blogger.par www-internal.blogger.com:80 2>>/home/bloggermail/m2b-output.log"

Then i tried using perl's XML::Atom (v 0.11) module to post, but the script would die reporting a 500 Server Error. I followed the actual tcp connection and saw that it was really getting a 401 error, and the following:
I'm sorry, we only support BASIC Authentication over SSL
Looking at the rest of the connection, i noticed that indeed the auth bit generated by XML::Atom was different than what blogger wanted, according to their sample page.

So i followed their sample page and tried to manually connect by 'telnet www.blogger.com 80' and typing in the correct data. Retrieving data worked (and i believe my auth string is correct since if i changed it i would get a "login failed" message), but posting data died with this Java error:
Exception caught but no reason given: java.io.EOFException
which led me to believe that something is wrong in their Atom implementation.

Finally i tried perl's Net::Blogger module, which implies that XML::Atom should be used instead (as do most blogger pages - the reason i didn't try Net::Blogger first). There is also a link from the Net::Blogger docs to the blogger API, and this API page states that it is no longer developed but still supported.

Sure enough, using Net::Blogger works to post messages to blogger. According to this page, blogger should accept html encoded pages, so perhaps i will again explore that later. For now, i'd like to get some speech-to-text cli software working so i can send a voice message to my e-mail that gets translated into the text of the post, instead of having to type in on my phone, and i need to come up with a way to add instructions on image editing to my text message, so the image can be cropped/lightened/etc.

Spent a lot of time working on a script so i could post from my phone. More on that later.

Oh, and this is the new generator at work.

Another easy subject.

The first photo i take with a new camera is always of my mom.